Every once in a while I come across a piece of art, music, a movie, a band, etc., which I think is fantastic, but gets panned by the public and the critics alike. In some cases, my appreciation for the Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk comes to mind, I'm not really sure I can justify my stance. (I've only ever met one other person who admits to liking this film, and I won't sully his reputation here.) However sometimes I'm absolutely convinced that I'm right, and that the world must just be peopled with aesthetic morons.
Case in point: David Bowie's fantastic 1995 album Outside. This was actually one of the first David Bowie albums I owned. I think I had his greatest hits collection at the time, and maybe Black Tie, White Noise which I had picked up for cheap somewhere. The latter album hadn't really appealed to me. (I didn't really care for R&B much at the time. I've since grown a fair appreciation for that album as well.) I'm not really sure why I picked it up. I suspect the presence of Brian Eno on the album may have been more of a draw than anything.
Walking back to my dorm room from Tower Records I slipped the disk into my CD Walkman and found myself completely blown away. By the time I reached my room, I'd decided to drop whatever else I was supposed to be doing (probably homework, seeing as classes had started). Instead I sat in my room, dimmed the lights, cranked the stereo up and just soaked it in.
It was amazing. It had all the energy and intensity of the industrial music I'd found myself drifting into (NIN, Ministry, KMFDM, etc), but it had a much more musical quality than those bands tended to. Plus, the production was gorgeous, and there was something about it that just seemed to have that extra spark.
I was hooked. I told all my friends about it, loaned them the album, played it on SKURV Radio. Everyone seemed to come back with sorta lukewarm responses. "Not really my thing," or "Interesting". The critical response wasn't much better. Many ended up outright panning the album. Even my man Stephen Thomas Erlewine of All Music Guide, (someone who I normally agree with quite a lot), gave it a mediocre review, calling it "deeply flawed", and giving it the backhanded complement of being "his best album since Let's Dance." Not exactly saying much. Anyway, needless to say, the album didn't do too well, and the two planned follow-ups (it was supposed to be a trilogy) have never appeared. Bowie went on to make other quite decent albums, and Eno went on being Eno. I went and enjoyed their back catalog, and sadly shook my head at the lost opportunity.
I was reminded of this album recently when Channel 4 showed David Lynch's film Lost Highway. The opening image is of a highway frantically racing past the camera placed inches above the pavement to the strains of Bowie's "I'm Deranged." Having thus whet my appetite just before going to bed, I woke up with a distinct hankering and promptly dumped our Bowie collection onto my iPod before walking to work the next morning.
Hearing Outside again in its entirety for the first time in a couple of years I'm astonished at how well it has held up. Arguably it might even sit better in the modern music scene than it did at the time. In 1995 it was seen as David Bowie's take on industrial music. A notion that was helped in part by the fact that "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" closed the movie Seven which also featured the Nine Inch Nails übersingle "Closer". Bowie's subsequent tour with Reznor and Co. probably reinforced this idea. However, at it's heart, Outside is not really industrial, but rather much more of a prog-rock opus. Heard today, the album brings to mind not NIN and Ministry, but rather post-"Kid A" Radiohead. While there are some well defined songs, much of the album is devoted to more abstract forms. Between the fleshed out songs, the album is peppered with "Seques" and character sketches, and filled with mood pieces that can perhaps be best described as tone poems. Certainly the frenetic energy of the album (and the paranoid cyberpunk subject matter) is grounded in the ethos of the mid-90's, but the music is actually quite a bit more exotic.
Take, for example, the album's first single "The Heart's Filthy Lesson." After a brief pseudo-instrumental and an opening song which sound rather like an orchestral warmup, followed by an overture, this third track sounds like a mission statement for the album. The layered production, samples and driving beat sound rather industrial, but then in the middle the song breaks open in a completely unexpected way with a free-jazz piano solo. In fact, the song (and indeed the whole album) has a loose, organic feel, even occasionally a bit of swing, which is entirely alien to industrial music.
This slide into the unusual is continued in the next track, the haunting tone-poem "A Small Plot of Land." Again, Mike Garson's free-form piano fantasia is the focus at the start, driven by a driving rhythm from Sterling Campbell. The noir-ish soundscape creeps in setting a suitably dark urban scene where the drums echo through deserted streets and piano tinkles onto the pavement like broken glass. Into this dark night, Bowie's voice provides not so much a melody, but rather a howling mantra, like a Greek chorus delivering a funeral dirge.
The narrative (what there is of it) is very much a product of its time. Outside is a concept album, but unlike such 70's works as Tommy, or The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the text steeped in the post-modern, non-linear zeitgeist of the mid-90's. Rather than a simple linear plot, we're presented with interior and exterior monologues from a collection of characters, all somehow associated with the brutal art-murder of a 14 year old girl. This metaphor of violence as art is embodied by the characters of the Minotaur, the artist and murderer, and Nathan Alder, the private-eye/art critic investigating (reviewing?) the case. The metaphor is surprisingly apt, as art critics, like detectives, are both engaged in trying to get inside the head of their subjects through their creations.
The effect is not unlike David Lynch's Twin Peaks, but an even more like that ever-so-mid-90's fad, the CD-ROM computer game. Like such classics of that genre, Myst, and the Resident's Freak Show, and Bad Day on the Midway, the plot is presented indirectly. We're presented with the commentary of those surrounding the event, and it's up to us to put the pieces together and imagine the excluded central event. In this respect, perhaps it's better that the trilogy was never completed. It leaves the story nicely ambiguous, like a Twin Peaks where Laura Palmer's killer is never revealed (the way David Lynch originally conceived it).
So, all in all, Outside is certainly not an easy listen. On the other hand, anyone expecting a simple collection of pop-songs from a Bowie/Eno collaboration must not have been paying attention to the content of their trio of albums in the 70's. If you're up for trying something different, I highly recommend it. It must be easy to find cheaply somewhere.
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